News

Bioinformatics training workshop: Your input wanted

12th Apr 2013

Modelling is progressing from the protein and molecular interaction level to tissue, organ, and whole-plant scales; while everything from genomics through to phenomics and, increasingly, field-level and multi-scale biology involves high throughput experiments. All of these necessitate ever greater computing power and use of complex analysis tools and software. We need you to tell us which areas of bioinformatics and data analysis you would benefit from training in, ahead of an upcoming GARNet workshop (in association with iPlant and the Hartree Centre).

The iPlant Collaborative is a community of researchers, educators, and students working to deliver a useful and usable cyberinfrastructure for plant science. Users are able to store and analyse their data online, and use iPlant tools for genome assembly, comparative genomics, CHiP and RNA Seq analysis, and much more. A working group is developing modelling tools at the moment, which will take advantage of the high performance computing power iPlant provides, and will support the construction, parameter estimation, sensitivity analysis, and utilization of models. All the resources are free for users worldwide and all are web based, requiring no specialist hardware at the user’s location.

To help UK scientists take advantage of this incredible resource, GARNet is running a training workshop on 17-20th September in association with The Hartree Centre and iPlant. The workshop will be in at Daresbury Laboratory and more information will be released soon.

The workshop programme will include interactive introductions to the main iPlant resources and hands-on tutorials in data analysis, data storage and data flow on iPlant. We want the rest of the programme to be decided by the research community, in order for you to get the most out of the workshop. We would like to know which specific areas you need more intensive training in to make the best possible progress in your research, so we are conducting a survey to find out.

We want people to go away from this meeting feeling able to use the tools that they have learned about independently in their own lab/project. All the training will be hands-on. We will work with the trainers to put together a programme that reflects the preferences of the community, but please understand that we can only cover a limited number of topics at the event.

This survey is only one question and will take just a couple of minutes of your time.